Pay Rs 5 to attend Modi meet, BJP tells workers

The Bharatiya Janata Party has charged its party workers Rs 5 per head for attending a mass meeting organised by the party to be held in Bhopal on September 25, which will be addressed by its prime ministerial candidate, Gujarat Chief Minister Narendra Modi.

The major highlight of the mass meeting would be BJP patriarch L K Advani sharing the dais with Modi, for the first time after the latter's official anointment as the BJP's prime ministerial candidate.

The event called the 'Karyakarta Mahakumbh' will be organised to commemorate the erstwhile Jan Sangh's senior leader Pandit Deendayal Upadhyaya's birth anniversary, ahead of the Madhya Pradesh assembly polls.

"We have charged Rs 5 per member for issuing entry passes. Nearly seven lakh BJP workers are expected to attend," Madhya Pradesh BJP's Chief Election Campaign In-charge Anil Madhav Dave told PTI.

However, he clarified that no entry fee would be levied from ordinary citizens who might attend to listen to Modi's address.

Dave also said that 20 booth level BJP workers each, from the 53,000 polling booths in MP have already collected their entry passes to attend the function.

"People are confusing it with the Hyderabad programme where Rs 5 tickets were sold to the public during Modi's meet, but here it is purely for booth-level BJP workers," he said.

However, taking a dig at the BJP for collecting a Rs 5 fee to attend Modi's meet, MP State Congress Vice President Rameshwar Neekhra criticised MP Chief Minister Shivraj Singh Chouhan for fixing the value of its prime ministerial candidate at merely Rs 5.